Yeast on the Rise in Colorado Prison

The media gets accused of being a lot of things: too liberal, too conservative, too sensational, too boring. But sometimes the media is just downright too…irrelevant. This story comes from the Associated Press, via 9News.com:

Mesa County authorities are trying to figure out who tried to smuggle two toothpaste tubes filled with brown paste into the county jail.

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Testing of the paste revealed it to be brewer’s yeast, which officials say can be used to make jailhouse hooch. But officials say what’s more surprising is the source. The yeast was found in a package of uniforms sent from a jail-item supply company in South Carolina.

Sheriff Stan Hilkey says the company has taken the incident seriously and is doing its own internal investigation to find the source of the yeast. Hilkey says he figures that either somebody in his jail has made a connection with a worker at a distribution center, or somebody intercepted the package and repackaged the uniforms with the yeast.

Stay tuned to hear about the Denver man who got a parking ticket and the Arvada woman who went to Denny’s and got overcharged for her Rootie-Tootie Fresh’n Frootie (or is that IHOP?). Somebody tried to smuggle yeast into a prison? Riveting. If somebody baked a file into a cake, then tell me about it. Yeast? Really? This is news?

Actually, I would be interested to hear how they packed yeast into toothpaste tubes. That seems like a lot of work. If you’re going to go to that much trouble for two toothpaste tubes worth of yeast, why wouldn’t you just fill it full of drugs instead? Couldn’t you get more money for a toothpaste tube of marijuana or heroin, or is the black market on yeast really that lucrative?

And who found the yeast? Did somebody try to brush their teeth with it? “My God, this isn’t toothpaste!”

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I was also amused by the quotes from Sheriff Hilkey on this investigation. I’ll bet he never thought he’d be conducting an internal investigation on yeast. “Detective Colombo, I need you to find the source of that yeast and break up that yeast distribution center! The yeast problem in this facility is out of control!”

The most surprising part of this story — and the most disappointing — is that 9News and the AP didn’t use the obvious headline: